Special - Shipping and Ship-Building: Is this the worst case senario?

Shipping and Ship-Building  
 
Is this the worst case scenario? Has the industry bottomed? Shall we ride the next decade of cyclical upswing on Shipping and Ship-Building? 
 
The shipping and ship-building industries have been in limbo. There exists oversupply, given that more ship deliveries are coming. There is no obvious turnaround in demand outlook, either from Euro-Asia routes or US-Asia routes. This old story has been told ever since 2008.While there seemed to have been a slight recovery in shipping activity between 2008 and 2013, it seemed to have went unacknowledged. 
 
I received 2 AsiaPac Shipping reports (1 from Standard Charted, 1 from Deutsche Bank) today. Despite the claims, I have yet to see analyst reports that balance the numbers on demand and supply (throughput vs. available container space, TEUs) and also replacement statistics (TEUs destroyed from scrapping of old ships vs. TEUs created from building of new ships). These numbers would be more useful in our decision making than pure claims. Understand that these are just update reports and therefore are meant to be short. My point here is to let everyone know exactly what numbers to look out for.  
 
In addition to shipping numbers, orderbook numbers of ship-builders and profit-margin trends are other indicators to lookout for. Yangzijiang's (BS6) 2Q13 revenues were up 12% yoy to RMB4.4b while net income declined 8% yoy to RMB812m. As at end Jun, the orderbook stood at 71 vessels worth a combined US$3.24b. It has 47 options outstanding (22 containerships and 25 multi-purpose bulk carriers) for contracts valued at US$2.54b. This is strong, in light of bearish sentiment. 
 
As for shipping lines, NOL (N03) reported a 2Q13 loss of US$35m. This was better than consensus. Counter is now trading at about 1.0x P/BV according to various analysts versus trough valuation of 0.79x. 
 
Now for some personal homework I did. Was at East Coast last Saturday, the number of empty ships in the horizon are still not very encouraging. The proximity of ships from the shore is also an indicator of the number of them parked out there. The last time I saw this was in 2008. We can use our waters as a benchmark because ships still pass our waters as the same routes have been used for the last 200 years (refer to Singapore’s Maritime history).